Passenger pigeon’s extinction, a somber remembrance

This preserved passenger pigeon, held by the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, is shown Thursday, Sept. 4, 2003, in Knoxville, Tenn., during the unveiling of a painting of the bird to benefit the Smokies' Tremont Institute. Friends of the Smokies support organization contacted Sevierville artist Robert Tino, an established painter of Smoky Mountains scenes, to create a painting of the pigeon to benefit the Smokies' Tremont Institute _ a research and education center for students and scientists from around the country. (AP Photo/Wade Payne)

Anniversaries are worth celebrating, but next month marks the 100th anniversary of a somber event. Martha, the last known Passenger Pigeon was found dead in her cage in the Cincinnati Zoo, Sept. 1, 1914. This is perhaps the only extinct creature for which we know the date and time of its vanishing. However, the passenger pigeon, also called the Wild Pigeon, had been gone from the wild since 1900.

Losing this bird might not seem like much. We still have healthy populations of mourning doves and rock pigeons. But those species cannot compare to the beauty or impact of the bird also called the Blue Pigeon. Writings by John James Audubon give a hint of what witnessing them was like.

Audubon described an experience he had in Kentucky in 1813 as he watched a flock of passenger pigeons. “The air was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse; the dung fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow; and the continued buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose.” He went on to describe the flock as a solid undulating mass like “the coils of a gigantic serpent.” Other 19th century eyewitnesses describe flocks that were a mile wide and 300 miles long.

In addition to the unimaginable number of these birds, their beauty was unlike any pigeon we’ve seen. The neck and back feathers were iridescent, vacillating from azure to copper depending on how the light hit them.

The pigeons were 15 to 16 inches long, about 50 percent larger than mourning doves. They ranged throughout North America, east of the Rockies from Texas to northern Canada. Their breasts were large because of the muscles used for rapid and long flights. They could fly between 60 to 70 mph to cover long distances between feeding and nesting territories.

The huge flocks moved based on food, migrating into forested areas laden with acorns, beech nuts, chestnuts or berries. When they had devoured the food within the square miles of their roosts, they took flight en masse to invade a new region.

Passenger pigeons were colonial birds, requiring a large number of their kind in proximity in order to breed. This was one cause of their demise. Even when their numbers were in the thousands, the flocks had diminished to the point where nesting success dropped drastically.

The primary reason for their extinction though was overhunting. Often cited as the most numerous bird on Earth, with populations estimated to be several billion at their peak, they were an easy target. Hunters shooting randomly into a flock could bring down hundreds with little effort. When industrial-scale hunting took hold, nets were used, enabling the capture of thousands at a time. Advanced killing techniques were aided by faster communication and transportation methods. Telegraph messages notified hunters in advance of approaching flocks so they could prepare for them. Trains enabled tons of the birds to be shipped into cities where they were sold for food. A whole industry developed around the pigeon slaughter, until it collapsed with their diminished population.

Toward the end, only small groups were seen, as recorded by Maurice Blaisdell, author of The Birds of Goffstown. He recalled a day from his youth in the mid 1880s when a neighbor “pointed out to me some Passenger Pigeons, then on the verge of extinction . . . I still remember those three birds flying swiftly high up in the northwest.”

We have no chance of seeing even three of these birds flying again, but museums across the country are marking this centenary with exhibitions about the passenger pigeon. Luckily you don’t have to go far to see how beautiful these birds were. The McLane Audubon Center in Concord will have a mounted passenger pigeon on display from mid-August through October, and the Mt. Kearsarge Indian Museum in Warner hosts an exquisite wooden example carved by local artist Ira Frost.

When you gaze at these memorials to the past, remember the words of Aldo Leopold, “There will always be pigeons in books and museums . . . but book pigeons cannot clap their wings in thunderous applause.” Then go out and appreciate the living birds and wildlife so they do not meet the same fate.

The hunting community has learned its lesson from the passenger pigeon and the bison. You yourself quoted Aldo Leopold, a hunter himself, and one of the founding fathers of the conservation movement. We may have lost the passenger pigeon - and almost lost the bison . . . but the wild turkey and white-tailed deer are here to remind us that hunters as a group do more good than harm to the environment.